ALLENTOWN, Pa. Dec. 31, 1999-With just a few hours remaining before the Year 2000 comes to central and eastern Pennsylvania, a PP&L, Inc. officer said Friday evening (12/31) that the company is well prepared for the challenge.
"PP&L people have been preparing for this night for the last four years," said Robert M. Geneczko, PP&L's vice president-Delivery Services. "PP&L has invested 140,000 hours, has spent $14 million and has tested 6,700 computer programs to make sure the lights of PP&L customers stay on as we enter the year 2000."
In addition, he said, the company has more than 550 people on duty tonight to ensure the new Millennium comes to PP&L customers without incident.
Some of the measures PP&L is taking tonight include:
- Staffing its seven largest substations to perform periodic equipment checks intended to verify that all systems are performing properly;
- Staging line crews and support personnel at offices throughout PP&L's 29-county service area; and
- Increasing staffing levels at its customer call centers.
"The 550 people on duty tonight are doing what we have done at PP&L for the last eight decades; taking every step necessary to ensure that our customers receive the finest electric delivery service," Geneczko said.
PP&L, Inc.'s parent company, PP&L Resources, reported that the Y2K changeover was uneventful for Western Power Distribution, a United Kingdom company co-owned by PP&L Resources. WPD transports and delivers electricity to 1.4 million customers there. For WPD, the level of trouble cases today has been significantly lower than normal for a winter's day. An hour after the midnight changeover, only four cases of trouble involving eight customers were being investigated due to minor equipment problems.
Unrelated to Y2K, PP&L crews have restored service in 15 scattered cases of trouble since midnight Friday, Dec. 31, involving only about 300 of the company's 1.3 million customers in central and eastern Pennsylvania. Most of the cases of trouble were caused by auto accidents and minor equipment failures. This level of trouble is significantly lower than normal for a winter's day.
The largest single case of trouble happened around 7 a.m. Friday, when a car struck and damaged a utility pole, interrupting power for about 120 customers in the Lansford and Tamaqua areas of Schuylkill County. Power was restored to those customers by around 4 p.m.
As early as 7 a.m. today, PP&L's command center was in contact with electric utilities in New Zealand and Australia that have identical controls on their electric delivery systems. "When midnight passed without any Y2K incidents in those countries, that increased our level of confidence that the start of the new year would be a non-event for PP&L," said Genezcko.
Based in Allentown, Pa., PP&L Resources is a Fortune 500 company that delivers electricity and natural gas to more than 1.3 million customers in Pennsylvania; sells wholesale and retail energy in more than 30 U.S. states and Canada; generates electricity at power plants in Pennsylvania and Maine; delivers electricity to 1.4 million customers in southwest Britain; and delivers electricity to more than 800,000 customers in Chile, Bolivia and El Salvador.